Equipment maintenance has become an increasingly important aspect of many businesses. Such maintenance has traditionally been categorized in various ways, such as breakdown maintenance, preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, and condition based maintenance.
Breakdown maintenance typically involves allowing equipment to run until it breaks, often with the assumption that the outage and repair costs will be less than a maintenance program. Preventive maintenance typically involves a calendar-based program that uses a piece of equipment's time off-line to run comprehensive tests on the equipment. Predictive maintenance uses known cause/symptom/effect relationships for a piece of equipment in order to predict the need for corrective action. Traditional condition based maintenance uses an approach that is similar to predictive maintenance, but enables scheduled maintenance to be skipped entirely if justified by the equipment's test results. Although each type of maintenance has its place, breakdown maintenance, preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, and traditional condition based maintenance all fail to adequately address the efficient provision of maintenance services to electrical equipment.
Accordingly, what is needed are a system and method to address the current deficiencies in the maintenance of electrical equipment.